Try Pots is the Nantucket inn recommended to Ishmael and Queequeg as a place famous for chowder, and it becomes their first practical refuge after reaching the island. Its importance is double: it offers food and lodging before their whaling business begins, yet its grotesque signs, dangerous implements, and overwhelming fishiness make it feel like a dark miniature of the sea-world they are about to enter.

Setting and Arrival

Try Pots is the establishment of Hosea Hussey, though Hosea is away when Ishmael and Queequeg arrive. The landlord of the Spouter-Inn directs them there, praising Cousin Hosea's chowder and implying that they could scarcely do better elsewhere. The journey through Nantucket is confusing because the directions depend on a sequence of landmarks: a yellow warehouse, a white church, and a turning whose exact orientation Ishmael and Queequeg initially dispute. After wandering in the dark and waking occasional inhabitants to ask the way, they finally recognize the inn by its conspicuous sign.

That sign consists of two enormous black wooden pots suspended from the cross-trees of an old topmast planted before the doorway. With its cross-tree horns cut away on one side, the mast resembles a gallows. The image immediately unsettles Ishmael, who associates it with the coffin-like name of the Spouter-Inn's landlord, the tombstones at the Whalemen's Chapel, and the apparent promise of two gallows, one for himself and one for Queequeg. The pots seem to add an allusion to Tophet, so that the inn's public emblem turns an ordinary lodging house into a threshold marked by death, punishment, and foreboding.

The Hussey Household

At the entrance Ishmael sees Mrs. Hussey, a freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing under a dull red lamp and briskly scolding a man in a purple woollen shirt. Her command that the man move along or risk being combed establishes the household's rough, comic energy before the travelers even enter. Although Hosea Hussey is absent, Mrs. Hussey is entirely competent to manage his affairs. She postpones her quarrel long enough to admit Ishmael and Queequeg, arrange their supper and bed, and direct the business of the inn.

Her first question is strikingly economical: she asks whether they want clam or cod. Ishmael's polite confusion over the question turns the inn's hospitality into another encounter with its specialized vocabulary. The choice is not between abstract dishes but between two local forms of marine sustenance, and the eventual meal confirms that Try Pots treats fish not as an occasional ingredient but as the governing substance of domestic life.

Chowder and Maritime Materiality

Try Pots is described as the fishiest of fishy places. Its pots are perpetually boiling chowders; chowder appears at breakfast, dinner, and supper; and the ground before the house is paved with clam shells. Mrs. Hussey wears a polished necklace made from codfish vertebrae, while Hosea's account books are bound in shark skin. Even the milk tastes fishy, a mystery Ishmael solves when he discovers Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants and walking along the beach with its feet in decapitated cod heads.

These details make the inn a material extension of Nantucket's whaling economy. Shells, bones, skin, scraps, food, clothing, and household records all carry the sea into the built environment. The inn therefore does not merely serve sailors; it transforms marine remains into paving, ornament, bookbinding, nourishment, and routine. Its domestic world is inseparable from the labor and creatures of the water.

Hospitality, Danger, and Foreshadowing

After supper, Mrs. Hussey gives the travelers a lamp and directions to their room. Before Queequeg can go upstairs, however, she demands his harpoon and forbids him to take it into the chambers. Her rule comes from the death of a boarder named Stiggs, who returned from a disastrous voyage lasting four and a half years with only three barrels of oil and was later found dead on the first floor with his harpoon in his side. The harpoon is thus both the defining tool of the whaleman and a weapon capable of turning the inn from shelter into a site of accidental death.

Ishmael objects that every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon, but Mrs. Hussey insists that danger justifies confiscating it until morning. Her practical prohibition establishes a boundary between maritime identity and domestic safety: Queequeg may be a harpooneer, but inside Try Pots his weapon must be surrendered. She immediately returns to the language of food by asking what the men will have for breakfast, and Ishmael answers that they want both clam and cod, along with smoked herring. The exchange joins danger and hospitality in a single rhythm, with the harpoon locked away while the next fish-based meal is already being planned.

Narrative and Global Whaling Context

The episode occurs before Ishmael and Queequeg are fully embarked in whaling, so Try Pots functions as a land-based prelude to the oceanic life that follows. From this modest inn, the narrative opens outward toward the larger claims made for whaling: the whale-ship is presented as a pioneer of exploration, a force connecting the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, and an agent in the commercial and political transformation of distant regions. Try Pots gives those global movements an intimate starting point. Before the whale-ship crosses oceans, two future crewmen must first find a lodging house by lantern light, eat chowder, and surrender a harpoon at the stairs.

Its significance also depends on contrast. The inn is enclosed, local, and domestic, but everything in it points toward an existence in which land may disappear for years. The black pots resemble a gallows; the fish remains become architecture and ornament; and the harpoon recalls both employment and death. Try Pots is consequently comic without being merely lighthearted. It condenses the book's recurring tension between nourishment and violence, shelter and exposure, ordinary custom and ominous destiny, preparing Ishmael and Queequeg to leave the island for the wider, more dangerous world of the Pequod.